Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy was born on a farm near Ingersoll, in Ontario, Canada, the daughter of a Methodist farmer and a Salvation Army officer. As a child she went with her mother to open air services and to work among the poor, an experience that would shape her future calling as a preacher.
At seventeen, she was converted under the preaching of the Pentecostal evangelist Robert Semple, whom she married in 1908. The couple set out as missionaries to China in 1910, but Robert died of malaria only months later, in Hong Kong. Widowed and pregnant, Aimee gave birth to her daughter Roberta alone, on the other side of the world.
Back in the United States, she married Harold McPherson and tried, without success, to live as a conventional wife and mother. The call to preach spoke louder: she left the marriage and began traveling the country holding healing and evangelistic meetings, city after city, in an old car she called the gospel car.
In 1922, during a campaign in Oakland, California, she named her message the Foursquare Gospel, drawing on Ezekiel’s vision of the four living creatures: Jesus as Savior, Baptizer in the Holy Spirit, Healer, and Coming King. On January 1, 1923, she dedicated the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, a building seating more than five thousand people.
A pioneer in the use of media, she founded the radio station KFSG in 1924 and became one of the first women in the United States to preach regularly over the airwaves. On the same site, she opened a Bible institute that would train thousands of pastors and missionaries, along with a social service that fed and clothed multitudes during the Great Depression.
In May 1926, she disappeared from a beach near Los Angeles and was presumed drowned; weeks later, she reappeared in the Arizona desert claiming she had been kidnapped and tortured. The case ended without any conviction, but was never fully resolved, and suspicion of an affair damaged her reputation for the rest of her life.
The years that followed brought further public setbacks: a troubled third marriage that ended in divorce after embarrassing court proceedings, and bitter disputes over control of the church, including temporary rifts with her own mother and daughter, who were also leaders in the movement.
She died in Oakland in 1944 of an accidental overdose of sedatives, at fifty three years of age. Despite the failures and scandals that marked her life, she left behind a denomination now present in dozens of countries and a model of mass evangelism that influenced generations of preachers after her.
